REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT RECEPTION FOR SENATOR BARBARA BOXER
Fairmont Hotel
San Francisco, California

5:10 P.M. PDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. First, let me say that I'm not
sure that evidence is good judgment to try to follow Barbara and Hillary
to the microphone. (Laughter.) But they certainly did a good job and I
enjoyed listening to them. Let me also thank, before I go too far, the
San Raphael High School Advanced Jazz Band. They did a great job, and
thank you all for playing. (Applause.)

I thank our State Democratic Chair, Arturos, for being here, and all
the candidates and officeholders who have come to support Barbara. When
I was listening to Senator Boxer and to the First Lady talk, and I was
watching you listen to them talk, I said to myself, well, all these
people are for her anyway. (Laughter.) So what should I say that would
help them get other people to be for her? And that's what Hillary was
trying to do.

Why should a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley vote for this not very
tall sparkplug from Northern California who is supposed to be so
liberal? (Laughter.) Why should a businessman in the Silicon Valley?
Why should a woman running a small tourist inn in the Redwood Forest?
Why should someone struggling to make ends meet in Los Angeles? Why
should someone in San Diego, worried about there's too much pollution or
illegal immigration, or whatever, on the border? Why should everybody
else vote for her, people that aren't here today? That's the case you'd
have to make, you know.

And if you think about the nature of our political debates and the
nature of the way the political parties behave in Washington and what
our administration has tried to do, I think it really comes down to
whether you want progress or politics to dominate the national arena.

Barbara said some of this, and at the risk of being self-serving --
I don't want to be -- but I want to read this to you, because when I
came to you in California in 1991 and '92, I said, look, you guys are
having a tough time out here, and I know this is the biggest state in
the country and my distinguished opponent says I'm just a governor from
a small southern state, but I've got a few ideas about how we ought to
do things differently moving towards the 21st century. And we've got
to break out of this crazy, highly partisan divisive debate we've got
and start putting people first and start thinking about the future to
create a 21st century America where there's opportunity for everybody
for everybody who's responsible enough to work for it; where we're
coming together as a community, respecting our diversity and still
valuing our unity, instead of being divided and weakened by it; and
where we're committed to preserving America's leadership in the world
for peace, and freedom, and prosperity. And I have some ideas about
how to do that.

Well, five and half years later, unemployment in California has
dropped by almost 50 percent. Senator Boxer said some of this, but I
want to say it again, not for me, but for her. Listen now. This
country has the lowest crime rate in 25 years. It has the lowest
unemployment rate in 28 years and 16 million new jobs. It has the
lowest welfare role as a percentage of the population in 29 years.
We're about to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years,
and it will be, in dollar terms, the biggest one we've ever had.
(Applause.)

We're going to have -- we've got the lowest inflation in 32 years,
the smallest federal government in 35 years, and the highest rate of
homeownership in the history of the United States of America. That is
the reality. (Applause.)

Now, in addition to that, I'm very proud of the fact that we have
the lowest rate of African American unemployment recorded, the highest
rate of Hispanic business ownership ever recorded, dramatic increases
in the number of Asian-owned and other minority owned businesses, a
tripling of federal government assistance to women-owned businesses, a
big decrease in inequality among working people for the first time in
over 20 years, 2.2 million children taken out of poverty -- (applause)
-- 5 million kids getting health insurance who wouldn't have otherwise
have gotten it.

We've opened the doors of college to virtually all Americans now
with the tax credits, the scholarships, the work-study programs. We
have done a lot of good things together because we put old-time
politics aside and put people first. Now, we had to take on a lot of
interests groups.

We made a lot of people mad when we said tobacco is the number one
public health problem in America; we're going to try to do something to
keep kids alive. And they're still trying to stop us from doing it and
putting out a lot of interesting misinformation in ad campaigns all
across America. But every year, more people die from tobacco-related
illnesses than accidents, murder, AIDS, cancer combined -- and a bunch
of other stuff, too.

We said, look, if we're ever going to get the crime rate down in
this country, we have to quit talking tough on crime and do something
that is both smart and tough. So we put 100,000 police on the street.
We took assault weapons off the street, insofar as we could legally.
We passed the Brady Bill and kept hundreds of thousands of people who
had criminal records from getting guns. And basically, the other side
opposed us. The House of Representatives just put out a budget which
would terminate the 100,000 police program, one of the most successful
programs in the history of the United States of America in lowering the
crime rate.

So here's what I want to say to you. You have to go out and say,
look, whether you're a Republican or independent or a Democrat, whether
you want to vote for a 7'2" tall man or a 4'10" woman -- (laughter.)

SENATOR BOXER: Eleven!

THE PRESIDENT: Eleven. (Applause.) Whatever your ethnic
background, whatever you bring to this race, California is beginning to
work, America is beginning to work, and this is not unrelated to the
ideas. Never mind the charisma or whether I give a good speech or
Barbara looks beautiful up here and makes you feel good about all the
energy and conviction she has -- the country is moving forward because
it is on a course that makes sense. And we should not change that
course, we should speed that course up. (Applause.)

I was glad to make the announcement that Barbara has been beating
up on me for over two years today. We not only extended the moratorium
on off-shore drilling for another decade, we made it permanent in
certain precious sanctuary areas so there can never be any drilling
there. (Applause.)

But what we want to do -- we need to do more than that. We need to
do more to try to make sure we can continue fishing without catching so
many other unrelated fish in the nets that we're destroying the
ecostructure. We need to do more research to see how we can reverse
some of this pollution. We need to do a lot more to stop the pollution
of the ocean from the land, because a lot of it is occurring from the
land. We need to do more exploration. We now know more about the moon
than we do, the ocean depths -- and it's only seven miles down to the
ocean depths -- long way under water isn't it. (Laughter.) We've got a
lot of things that directly affect how our children and grandchildren
will live -- you heard Barbara talking about some of them.

We now have dramatically expanded pre-school education. We've made
access to college virtually universal. But no one believes that our
public schools, K-12, are as good as they ought to be. California is
doing a very good job, I think, now -- the people of California and the
grass-roots movement -- with things like the charter school movement.
There was one charter school in America when I became President. When I
started talking about them, most people thought that it had something to
do with teaching people how to draw maps. (Laughter.) And our budget
would take us up to over 3,000 over the next four years.

Our budget would make sure we finish the work of connecting every
school, classroom, and library to the Internet by the year 2000.
(Applause.) Our budget would give communities enough funds to build or
rehabilitate 5,000 schools so we can have smaller classes when we put
the 100,000 teachers in -- that work. (Applause.) Our budget attempts
to fund an initiative, along with some of the other legislation we have,
to make our schools even safer to deal with these horrible instances
we've all had our hearts broken about in the last few months in our
schools, and other things that aren't so severe, but are still very
troubling, by not only dealing harshly with people who do wrong, but by
trying to prevent these things from happening in the first place.

And we know that there are certain early warning that come out in a
lot of these instances that our schools are not organized to deal with,
that our parents sometimes are not even attuned to. We also know that
if we had children who are from difficult backgrounds, who live in
difficult neighborhoods in and around the school more hours a day, they
would get in less trouble. Our budget provides, as Barbara Boxer said,
for a huge increase in after-school programs and summer school programs.

Let me just tell you one story. Hillary is from Chicago, and she
will tell you that when we were serving in Arkansas, most people
thought that Chicago schools were the worst big-city schools in America.
And they had a strike there every year whether they needed to or not.
(Laughter.) They're not known for their teacher strikes anymore,
they're known for their parent councils in every school. They're known
for the fact that they have tens of thousands of children who now get
three meals a day in the school. They're known for the fact that their
summer school -- they have mandatory summer school for people who don't
score at a certain level from grade to grade. Their summer school is
now the sixth biggest school district in the entire United States of
America. (Applause.)

And guess what? Juvenile crime has dropped through the floor,
because they're taking care of kids and giving them something positive
to live for and building them up. And that's what we want to do.

We have a lot of other things to do in the environmental area. We
have a lot of other things to do in the health care area. This health
care bill of rights -- I heard you cheering for Barbara when she talked
about that -- I'm telling you, every hour in America -- and I say that
as somebody who has not been opposed to the managed care movement in
principle -- we couldn't have continued the way we were going where
inflation in health care was going up at three times the rate of
inflation and income in America. That was unsustainable. But we can't
continue the direction we're going now where the only thing that
controls health care decisions for people in HMOs is too often the
bottom line. That is crazy.

We cannot allow it and we need a health care bill of rights to
protect patients, to protect people, to make sure they get the care
they need. You can have good management and still put quality health
care first.

So there's a huge agenda out there. (Applause.) What I want you
to go out there and say to your friends and neighbors and fellow
Californians, who have been so good to me and the First Lady and the
Vice President, is, look where we are now; look where we were in 1992.
Don't just look even at the budget surplus or the economy. Look at all
these things. Ideas drive action and get results, good or bad. Now,
we all have things happen that are beyond our control, and I don't
claim full credit for every good thing that's happened in America. You
and the other American people deserve most of the credit. You get up
and lead your lives every day, and you've done things that make sense
and do good.

But you know as well as I do that we wouldn't have elections and
give people authority to make decisions if the decisions didn't amount
to anything. It matters. So the first thing I want you to say to
somebody who says, well I'm too conservative to vote for Barbara Boxer,
or, I'm a Republican, or I'm this -- say, look, you're a Californian,
you're an American; look where you are now, look where you were then,
their ideas were right. They put them in, they had good consequences,
and they've got good ideas for the future. This is about progress over
politics.

Then you ought to talk about these things that Barbara talked about
for the future and ask people to vote as American citizens in this
election, for their children and their grandchildren. And if you do
that, she will have a great victory, California will have a great
victory, and it will certainly be the right thing for America.